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Author Archives: Ivan Lisitsyn
Software performance testing at educational institutions
A recent study of our clients has revealed an interesting phenomenon: the number of universities, school districts, training centers and all other types of commercial and non-profit educational organizations is disproportionally high among the users of our load testing tools. Continue reading
Posted in General, Testing practice
Tagged cloud testing, education, load test, load testing tools
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WAPT Pro 5.0: Small features making big difference
We released the latest versions of our load testing tools few months ago. All users who have had an opportunity to update their product installations already know that two major features in that release were the support of HTTP/2 protocol and the ability to execute concurrent requests in each user session. In fact, each of those features is a complement to the other one, because the development of HTTP/2 was inspired by the idea of concurrency in the first place.
Yet, it is true that not every web application has switched to the new version of the protocol by now. So, what if your test project does not require any of these major features? Will you get any benefits after upgrading to WAPT Pro 5.0 from the previous version of the tool? Continue reading
Posted in General, Testing practice, WAPT usage
Tagged HTTP headers, load test, new release, POST-request, test report, WAPT Pro
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WAPT Pro 5.0 beta: HTTP/2 with true concurrency
We have been working on this for quite some time. Now a new version of WAPT Pro is about to appear, and this time we decided to start with releasing it in beta. Even though the tool GUI looks almost unchanged, all parts that actually do the work (test recorder and load generation unit) have been completely rewritten. This was not done just to squeeze out a few percent of performance or because the old code was bad. It was very good for executing user sessions consisting of successive HTTP requests. This concept is still applied by the majority of the load testing tools, but we wanted to become the true concurrency pioneers. Continue reading
Why go with SoftLogica
When I speak to our CEO, who is in charge of our marketing processes, he keeps telling me that there are too many vendors like us in the IT world and we desperately need to differentiate somehow to be spotted by anyone out there.
The “try before you buy” concept does not work anymore. Trying something is an exhaustive task. People cannot oblige themselves to toil that much. Worst of all, even after you’ve tried a lot, you may still be uncertain if that was a good experience or not. Continue reading
Testing of a website behind a load balancer
When you plan a load test, one of the first things you need to know about the backend configuration is if it includes a load balancer. This is important because most load balancers distribute new user sessions by the client IP address. Some of them allow changing the distribution method. However this may be achievable only by a significant configuration change. You will hardly persuade the site admins to make such changes in the production environment.
What is a bit embarrassing in this respect is that even if you select the “distribute to the least loaded” option in LB settings, this may still mean that it will use this rule only for new IPs. After the initial connect, each IP is remembered for a certain time (from 1 hour to few days) and all new connections from the same IP will be directed to the same web server.
This creates a very big problem for load testing. If you use WAPT Pro, or any other efficient load testing tool, by default all your virtual users will share the same IP address and will be directed to the same web server behind the LB. As a result, you will not be able to test the whole system correctly. Continue reading
Load testing of HTTPS web sites
As you probably know, the percent of secure HTTPS web sites is growing every day. Moreover, even if you do not care about security, the latest news from Google suggests that you will have to move to HTTPS in any case, because otherwise you will see your site dropping down in search results.
Depending on the implementation of your site, switching it to secure connection may take from few minutes to few weeks. You may face functional problems, broken links and thigs like that. Imagine that after you have done everything required, you finally see your site working under the perfect green line of the browser address bar. The question is: what have happened with the site performance, and should you load test it again?
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WAPT 9.3 and WAPT Pro 4.3
Last week we released updates to our products, so it’s time to make some notes on this in addition to the official information, which (as usual) can be found on our site. In fact, I recommend taking a look at the list of new features before reading further. I would not say that we introduced anything to change the world of load testing, but few of the additions put us ahead of our competitors, which is definitely good. Let’s get to the list… Continue reading
Posted in WAPT usage
Tagged HTTP cookies, HTTP headers, new release, SharePoint testing, test execution, test execution log
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Response validation with JavaScript code
One of the benefits of the Pro version of WAPT in comparison with the regular one is that you can insert JavaScript code inside profiles to handle various calculations. This can be used to parametrize complex user sessions when session-specific values are not contained in the response page code explicitly. Another example is when you cannot extract values from the response with help of standard functions, like “Search Parameter”, because bounding text may be variable. So, you need to implement more complex search algorithms to find the right value occurrence. Continue reading
What I like the most in WAPT Pro 4.0
We introduced WAPT Pro 4.0 about a month ago. It was a long awaited release that we had been working on for more than two years. The full list of new features is available here as usual. This looks more like a marketing message, of course. If you want to know what I personally think about each feature, I can provide different comments using the same list. This is a kind of exclusive information for the readers of this blog. Continue reading
12 typical confusions for a novice load tester
After several years of work with our customers I decided to summarize my experience by gathering the most common user confusions resulted in questions to our technical support service. I think that most of these issues were caused by wrong ideas or interpretations people may have had. In other words, in each specific case the problem was caused not by the lack of information, but rather by some sort of incorrect assumptions.
Of course, nothing like that would be possible if everyone spent couple hours reading the user guide before trying to use the product. But for some reason people rarely do it this way. Continue reading
Posted in General, Testing practice, WAPT usage
Tagged HTTP status code, load test, session variables, user session
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